Digital Trends

Onkyo TX-SR606

June 4th, 2008 | by Chris Chiarella

Design and Features

I performed my review on the silver-chassis version and, once my infatuation with its looks wore off, I set about connecting all of my components to the well-designed rear panel. More than enough inputs awaited me: five composite video and four S-video with shared analog stereo, in addition to two component video inputs, assignable to any of the two digital optical and two digital coaxial audio inputs. What really got my juices flowing were the four HDMI inputs, up from the 605's two. HDMI-switching receivers such as these use what's known as an HDMI repeater, which essentially regenerates the audio/video signal sent by the component over the original HDMI connection before passing it out again over another cable, to the HDTV.

The TX-SR606 passes a full 1080p signal (1080 lines, progressive scan, the best that HD currently has to offer) and is HDMI 1.3a-compliant. The higher bandwidth of 1.3a means that it accepts the raw digital bitstreams of the high-resolution Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio formats, in addition to supporting up to 48-bit color depth (the current standard is 24-bit) and potentially higher frame rates. So right away we know that the TX-SR606 is a good investment today, and one that will provide headroom for the future of consumer electronics as the quality continues to improve. Onkyo has also added Remote Interactive over HDMI (RIHD), their own proprietary spin on the more common Consumer Electronics Control (CEC), to better allow the operation of multiple connected HDMI devices from different manufacturers with a single remote.

Pumping out a solid 90 watts for each of its seven channels (left, right and center front, left and right side surround plus left and right rear surround), the TX-SR606 accepts spade, banana, and bare wire speaker wire terminations. A sub pre-out also passes the dedicated low-frequency directly to a powered subwoofer. In a keen bit of rear-panel economy, the back surround speaker terminals can be repurposed to bi-amplify the left and right mains, if you have fancier front loudspeakers and no rears. Additional push-terminal speaker hookups are provided for a powered stereo Zone 2, for remote listening in a different room, even from an alternate source, should you want a movie in the home theater and music up in the kitchen at the same time, if that's your pleasure.

AM and FM antennas are in the box, and the receiver provides a total of 40 station presets. The TX-SR606 is also Sirius-ready, meaning that if you are a subscriber with your own SiriusConnect Home tuner and antenna, you can plug into the eight-pin jack and enjoy satellite radio through your home theater, quickly and easily. As this is also the MP3 age, Onkyo has added a Music Optimizer circuit, a generally successful effort to restore some of the sound quality and visceral impact lost when songs are compressed down to small digital files. To this end, Onkyo is also selling the optional DS-A2X Remote Interactive iPod Dock ($109).

Image Courtesy of Onkyo